Awesome column by Chris Fitzsimon

The News and Observer’s Sunday edition featured yet another investigative story detailing the dangerous condition of the state’s mental health system. This time the problem revealed is the placement of people with mental illness in rest homes where the staff has no training to take care of them.

That puts everyone at risk, the patients with mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, the other rest home residents, and the staff and visitors. And that’s not just a potential problem. There have been scores of reported incidents including rapes and other violent acts.

The N&O reports that there are now more than 6,000 people suffering from mental illness in the state’s rest homes, a 15 percent increase in the last four years. The culprit, not so indirectly, is the way the state’s mental health reform efforts have been conducted, downsizing state mental hospitals without providing enough funding for community programs to provide services.

People with mental illness need help, whether the state’s commitment to fund services has caught up with state officials’ rhetoric about reform or not. Carmen Hooker Odom, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services told the N&O “We haven’t seen the necessary commitment of resources, locally or nationally.”

No we haven’t and whose fault is that? The General Assembly? Sure, lawmakers should have provided more funding. Congress should have too. But Odom and her boss, Governor Mike Easley, are ultimately responsible for the state’s mental health system. If a potentially violent 23-year-old man with schizophrenia is in the room beside a frail 80-year-old woman in a rest home where no one is trained in caring for the mentally ill, that is a crisis that demands action, not a lament that we haven’t seen the necessary resources.

Here's the rest of the column.

PS Sorry for the long excerpt, Chris, but lots of people need to read this.